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SOME PROBLEMS IN JAINA PSYCHOLOGY
touch located in the body or at the surface of the body. The term sensation is also extended to cover the visual data, sound, taste, and smell which may enter into immediate experience. Sensations vary not only with the variations in the presented objects but also in accordance with the state of the bodily organs. They are private and immediate experiences of the individual.47 Sensations are aboriginal and without precedent; a mental first cause, uncaused by antecedent mental events and inexplicable in strictly psychological terms. They are a first beginning of the knowledge, and the ultimate source upon which all empirical cognition rests.48 Further, sensations are simply given rather than made. They are 'impressions' which the mind passively receives. They constitute, as Lewis says, a content of experience "which we do not invent and cannot have as we will, but merely find".49 During the period of two hundred years between the publication of Locke's Essay and of James's Principles, two further characteristics, now largely of antiquarian interest, were gradually attributed to sensation. Sensations were held to be the simple elements of which complex ideas are formed, as well as the matter or crude stuff out of which the associative machinery fashions the organized and meaningful world of everyday experience. 50
In this sense we can say that avagraha is the stage of sensation. It is the first stage of experience. It is the given. It does not involve the stage of darśana, which is qualitatively different from jñāna. Avagraha is a species of jñāna. Therefore, we describe avagraha as the immediate experience. It is sensation.
Stages in Avagraha
Avagraha has been identified by us with sensation, the immediacy of experience. It is bare awareness of the existence of the object without any determination of its specific features. This fact becomes clear if we remember that avagraha has been further distinguished into two stages: (i) vyañjanāvagraha and arthāvagraha.51 Vyañjanavagraha is the earlier stage. It is a physiological stimulus condition of the sensation, of the immediate experience. In the Viseṣāvaśyaka Bhāṣya we get a description of vyañjanavagraha. There it is said that what reveals an object, as a lamp reveals a jar, is vyañjanāvagraha. It is only the relation of the sense organ and the object in the form of sense stimulation such as sound,52 In the Nandisutra, we get an example of the earthen
47 Stout (G. F.): Manual of Psychology, p. 123.
48 Sense-datum theory and observational fact: Some contributions of Psychology to Epistemology: Journal of Philosophy, Jan. 1958.
49 Article in the Journal of Philosophy, Jan. 2, 1958, by Charles F. Wallraff. 50 Ibid.
51 Tattvārthasutra, I. 17-18. Arthasya vyañjanāvagrahaḥ.
52 Viseṣāvasyakabhāṣya, 191. 193.
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